Crop of New Law Schools Opens Amid a Lawyer Glut

Law-school applications are at their lowest in a decade, but that hasn't stopped a handful of colleges and universities across the nation from opening new law schools.

Some of the new schools are intended for regions where law schools are scarce or are being built to round out a university's suite of professional schools. But many of them are likely to find themselves competing for a shrinking pool of would-be lawyers and sending hopeful graduates into one of the toughest markets in years for law jobs.

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The law school being built at Indiana Tech is to open this fall.
Indiana Tech

Indiana Tech's new law school in Fort Wayne will be the state's fifth when it opens this fall. The law school the University of North Texas plans to open in Dallas next year will be just down the road from Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law, and less than an hour's drive from one in Fort Worth that Texas A&M University is in the process of buying from Texas Wesleyan University, one of nine in the state.

The numbers don't favor these new schools. Last year the pool of law-school applicants shrank to about 68,000, down about 13% from 2011 and more than 30% from the past decade's peak of about 100,000 in 2004, according to the Law School Admission Council, a nonprofit group that administers the Law School Admission Test and compiles admissions data.

Enrollment at ABA-Approved Law Schools

See enrollment figures from 1964 to present for schools approved by the American Bar Association and the number of law schools for each year.

The coming school year looks even grimmer. As of last Friday, only 30,000 people had applied for entrance. That's a 20% drop from a year earlier and the lowest number in the past decade to have submitted applications as of mid-January.

Ellen S. Pryor, associate dean for academic affairs at UNT Dallas College of Law, said her school aims to serve local college students seeking an affordable, hands-on legal education, and will draw a different pool of applicants than other north Texas law schools.

"I know applications are down," Ms. Pryor said, but "the fact that nationwide numbers are down doesn't dishearten us from thinking we'll get really good students and fulfill our mission."

The expansion comes at a crossroads for legal education. Law schools are turning out more graduates than ever—and charging higher tuition—even as law jobs have become increasingly hard to come by. Many law firms laid off lawyers during the economic downturn, when demand for legal services cratered, and competition for what jobs are left remains fierce.

Members of the law-school class of 2011 had little better than a 50-50 shot at landing a job as a lawyer within nine months of receiving their degree, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis last year. At the same time, some law graduates are saddled with as much as $150,000 in student-loan debt, in part because tuition is rising faster than the rate of inflation.

The statistics do give some educators pause. "It seems like the worst possible time to open a new law school," said Brian Z. Tamanaha, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and frequent law-school critic who last year published a book titled "Failing Law Schools."

André D.P. Cummings, associate dean for academic affairs at Indiana Tech's new law school, said plans to enroll 100 students in the fall class may have to be scaled back. "Are we where we'd like to be?" he said. "Not yet. The truth is that applications are down significantly across the country."

Mr. Tamanaha said schools may be finding it hard to derail plans set in motion before the current drop became apparent.

Those planning the new crop of law schools also may be playing a long game, said Stephen Diamond, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. "The financial backing they have is presumably looking down the road beyond the downturn," he said.

During the law-school boom between 1950 and 1970, about 20 schools per decade got accredited by the American Bar Association. In the 1980s and 1990s, that pace dropped back to eight per decade.

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There's been a resurgence this century, with 19 new schools getting ABA's stamp of approval since 2000, and more on deck. New schools are popping up in states with rising populations like Florida, California and Texas, said Barry Currier, a former law-school professor who is the ABA's interim consultant on legal education.

Existing schools are under pressure to cut costs and boost enrollment. In 2012 the number of first-year students entering law school fell 8.6% from 2011, according to the ABA.

Many established schools are luring elite students with scholarships in an effort to maintain their rankings. Some experts predict that some schools will be forced to close their doors if current enrollment trends continue. Mr. Currier said no ABA-approved school that he knows of has shut down in the past four decades.

"The notion that we need to open more law schools is absolutely crazy," said Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado who contributes to a blog called "Inside the Law School Scam." The current law-school model is unsustainable, given that "there are at least two graduates for every available legal job," he said, adding that educators launching new schools are "blind to the economic realities."

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